National Book Critics Circle Nominates Last Year's Best Books

The National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization composed of 600 book critics and reviewers from across the country, recently announced the finalists for the 2004 book awards. The winners in each category—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and biography/autobiography—will be named on March 18.

The Finalists in Poetry Brigit Pegeen Kelly for The Orchard (BOA Editions, Ltd.) D.A. Powell for Cocktails (Graywolf) Adrienne Rich for The School Among the Ruins (Norton) James Richardson for Interglacial (Ausable Press) Gary Snyder for Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)

The Finalists in FictionEdwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker (Knopf) Alan Hollinghurst for The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury) David Mitchell for Cloud Atlas (Random House) Marilynne Robinson for Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Philip Roth for The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin)

In addition, the organization's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Louis D. Rubin, Jr., the founder of Alqonquin Press.

The winner of last year's National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry was Susan Steward for Columbarium; the winner in fiction was Edward P. Jones for The Known World.